And thus there commenced another period of my life, which I must speak of very briefly, – which indeed I do not care to speak of at all, but which I will think about as long as I live. I did not see very much of him at first. I was nearly seventeen now, and very shy; and Mary watched over me, and took great pains not to expose me to chance meetings with the stranger, or any unnecessary trouble. Ellen managed everything between us. She was a good, trustworthy woman, and we did not require to interfere; she was full of praises of Mr Durham, who never gave any trouble he could help. But one night, when I was taking tea with Mrs Stephens, he happened to come in, and we had the pleasantest evening. He knew a song I had just learned, and sang a second to it in the most delightful deep voice. He talked and rattled about everything. He made Mrs Stephens laugh and he made me laugh, and he told us his adventures abroad till we were nearly crying. When it was time for me to go he got up too, and said he would go with me. “Oh, it is only next door; I can go alone,” I said, in my shyness. “It is only next door, but I live there too, and I am going to work now,” he said. “To work! when all the rest of the world are going to bed?” said Mrs Stephens; “you will make yourself ill.” How he laughed at that! his laugh sounded like a cheery trumpet. He did not mean to kill himself with work. “But I hope you will let me come to tea again,” he said. How pleased Mrs Stephens was! She always says she likes young people, and we had spent such a pleasant night.
Many more of these pleasant evenings followed. Sometimes when we were sitting quiet after tea, she would send for me suddenly; sometimes she would write a little note in the afternoon. This expectation filled my life with something quite new. I had never had many invitations or pleasures before: I had never expected them. When we sat down to work after tea I had known that it was for the whole evening, and that no pleasant interruption would disturb us. But now a little thrill of excitement ran through my whole life. I wondered, would a note come in the afternoon? If it did not come, I wondered whether the bell would ring after tea, and Ellen come in saying, “If you please, ma’am, Mrs Stephens’s compliments, and would Miss Mary go in, and take her music?” Mary never interfered; never said “Don’t go.” She looked at me sometimes very wistfully; sometimes she smiled and shook her head at me, and said I was getting dissipated. Once or twice she looked anxious, and told me a story, which I only half understood, of girls who met with people they liked, and were very happy, and then lost sight of them ever after. Mary was very clever at telling stories, and I was fond of listening; but she did it so well and delicately that I fear I never thought of the moral – never, at least, till all the harm was done and it was too late.
I would not have any one think, however, that Mr Durham either meant or did any harm. To say so would be very wrong. It was as imperceptible with him as with me. He went quite innocently, as I did, to cheer up Mrs Stephens, and because an evening’s chatter with a little music was pleasant; and by degrees we thought less and less of Mrs Stephens and more and more of each other. If any one meant anything beyond this, it was she who was the guilty person. She would nod off to sleep in her easy-chair while we were talking. She would say, with a sleepy smile, “Don’t mind me, my dears. The light is a little strong for my eyes. That is why I close them – but I like the sound of your voices even when I don’t hear what you say.” Alas, if she had heard everything that had been said it might have been better. After a while he began to say strange things to me while she had her doze. He talked about his family to me. He said he hoped I should know them some day. He said his mother was very kind and wise – “a wise woman.” These were the very words he used. And then he said – other things; but that was not till the very, very last.
One morning we met in the little hall. It was raining, and it was a holiday, and when he insisted on following me into the schoolroom, what could I do – I could not shut him out. He seemed to fill the whole room, and make it warm and bright. I do not think we had ever been quite alone before. He came to the window and stood there looking out upon the bare bit of smoky grass and the water-butt. And then all at once he came to me and took my hand. “If I had a nice little house out in the country, with flowers and trees about it, a bright little house – Mary – would you come and be my little wife, and take care of it and me?”
Oh, what a thing to have said to you, all at once, without warning, in the heart of your own dull little life, when you thought you were to work, and pinch, and put up with things, for ever! It was different from my old fancy. But how poor a thing to have been found out to be Lady Mary in comparison with this! What I said is neither here nor there. We stood together in the little old study, among the forms where we had our little scholars, as if we had been in a fairy palace. I was not seventeen. I had no experience. I thought of nothing but him, and what he said. It was not my part to think of his father and mother, and what he would do, and what he wouldn’t do. He was a great deal older than I was; about thirty, I believe. Of course, I thought of nothing but him.
“Do you know,” he said, after a long time, “I have never seen your stepmother, Mary? I have been three months in the house, and I have never seen her. I must go and see her now.”
“Oh, wait a little,” I said; “wait a day. Let us have a secret all to ourselves one day.” How foolish I was! – but how was I to know?
He consented after a while; and then he made me promise to bring her out at a certain hour in the afternoon, that he might meet us at the door and see her. I made all the arrangements for this with a light heart. Though it was very difficult to hide from her what had happened, I did so with a great effort. I persuaded her to come out earlier than usual. She did not resist me. She was kinder, more tender, than I had ever known. She began to say something of a story she had to tell me as we went out. I went first and opened the door, and stood aside on the white steps to let her go out. Her crape veil was thrown back. Though she was still pale, there was a tint of life upon her cheeks. She was more like herself in her refined, delicate beauty, more like a lily, my favourite image of her, than she had been for ever so long.
I had begun to smile to myself at the success of our trick, when suddenly I got frightened, I could scarcely tell how. Looking up, I saw him standing on the pavement gazing at her, confounded. I can use no other word. He looked bewildered, confused, half wild with amazement. As for Mary, she had stopped short on the step. She was taken strangely by surprise too; for the first moment she only gazed as he did. Then she dropped her veil, and stepped back into the house. “I have forgotten something,” she said; and turned round and went upstairs to her room. He came in, too, and went upstairs after her, passing without looking at me. His under lip seemed to have dropped; his cheerful face had lost all its animation; his eyes had a wild, bewildered stare in them. What did it mean? oh! what did it mean?
I did not know what to do. I wondered if he had followed her to speak to her, or what was the meaning of those strange looks. I lingered in the hall holding the handle of the door, feeling miserable, but not knowing why. In two or three minutes she came downstairs. “I had forgotten my handkerchief,” she said; and we went out together as if nothing had happened. But something had happened, that was certain. She did not talk very much that day. When we were coming home she said to me, quite suddenly, “Was it your doing; Mary, that I met Mr Durham at the door?”
“He said it was so strange he had never seen you,” I said.
“Yes; but you should have known I would not do that for nothing. You should not have been the one to betray me, Mary. I knew Mr Durham once. He is associated with one of the most painful portions of my life.”
“Oh, Mary dear! I did not know – ”
“You did not know, and I did not want you to find out; but never mind, it is done. It need not, I hope, do any harm to you.”
That was a very strange day: the excitement of the morning, and then the other excitement; and to feel that I had a secret from her, and that he was seated upstairs giving no sign, taking no